We’d like to share a story. Not a statistic, not a clinical abstraction, but a real case that illustrates exactly why Radence exists and what becomes possible when you decide to look earlier.
Dr. Nicholas A. Marston, a member of Radence’s Clinical Advisory Board, is a preventive cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His work sits at the intersection of genetics, advanced biomarkers, and early cardiovascular disease – the precise frontier where Radence operates. We recently sat down with him and we believe what he shared with us will matter to you.
The Test That Changed a Trajectory
A patient of Dr. Marston’s had suffered a heart attack in her early 40s. Her two daughters, now in their mid-30s, came to him with a simple question: given what happened to their mother, what should they be doing to prevent a similar outcome for themselves?
Both daughters received the same evaluation, including advanced coronary CT imaging — a non-invasive scan that allows physicians to see plaque forming in the arteries of the heart, years before it causes symptoms. One daughter had no plaque at all. The other had severe coronary atherosclerosis — significant, aggressive disease in a woman in her mid-30s with no symptoms and no prior indication anything was wrong.
“She’s a mom herself. Three kids. A full-time job. This was a shock. But as I always tell patients when we find this — this is why we do the testing. Because now we can be very intentional with what we do next. We have the therapies to stop this disease in its tracks, and in some cases even reverse it. If we hadn’t found this, the disease would only have gotten worse — and likely led to a heart attack or bypass surgery at a young age.”
She is now on a targeted treatment protocol that has driven her LDL to levels low enough to actually reduce some of the existing plaque burden. Her trajectory has been fundamentally altered. Not because she got sick. Because she chose to look before she did.
The Disease Was There for Years. The Opportunity Was Too.
This is the central insight that shapes how Radence thinks about cardiovascular risk. Heart disease doesn’t arrive suddenly. Most people who have a cardiac event in their 60s or 70s had measurable evidence of early disease two decades earlier — evidence that was simply never looked for.
“Think about a large cruise ship. If you want to change where it ends up, you move the trajectory early. A small change in your 40s is going to have a huge benefit down the line. We’re trying to protect these patients for 30, 40 years. It just takes a small change now to end up in a very different place later.”
Most people in their 40s and 50s are not at significant cardiovascular risk in the next five to ten years. That is precisely the window in which intervention is most powerful — and most overlooked.
What Standard Care Is Still Missing
Dr. Marston is one of the leading voices on a lipid marker called lipoprotein(a) — Lp(a) — that most standard blood panels don’t include. It is genetically determined, meaning it doesn’t respond to diet or lifestyle, and it is highly associated with early and aggressive heart disease. Roughly one in five people have significantly elevated levels. Most have never been tested.
The reason this matters right now: 2026 is expected to bring the first Phase 3 clinical trial results for Lp(a)-specific therapies — drugs that can reduce elevated Lp(a) by up to 95%. Phase 3 is the final stage before FDA approval. If results are positive, a new class of treatment becomes available for a risk factor that currently has no targeted therapy.
“I see a lot of early heart attack patients in my clinic. A lot of them have high Lp(a). The current therapies — statins and others — don’t lower it meaningfully. We’ve needed something specific. We’ll know very soon if we have it.”
Lp(a) is tested as part of the Radence cardiovascular evaluation. For members who carry elevated levels, this is not an abstract finding — it is an actionable data point that shapes monitoring strategy and, soon, treatment options.
The Shift Happening in Medicine Right Now
When we asked Dr. Marston what single shift he sees transforming cardiovascular care over the next five years, his answer was immediate.
“The shift is from reactive to proactive. It used to be that we diagnosed heart disease when someone came in with a heart attack — decades after the disease began. Now we keep moving earlier and earlier. Not only preventing second events, but first events. Not only preventing events, but preventing the disease from reaching any clinically significant point at all. That’s where we’re headed.”
This is the medicine Radence is built around. Not reactive care that responds after something has gone wrong. A structured, sustained model that looks for risk while the window to act is still open.
What this means for you.
The daughter in Dr. Marston’s story didn’t feel unwell. She had no symptoms, no prior diagnosis, no reason to think something was wrong. What she had was a family history and the decision to take it seriously.
Radence membership begins with a comprehensive evaluation designed to find what standard care is not structured to look for, and to build a strategy around what it finds. Dr. Marston and our full Clinical Advisory Board shape how that evaluation is designed and how findings are interpreted.
Most people who come to Radence aren’t thinking about themselves. They’re thinking about those who need them.
If you’ve been considering membership, we’d welcome the conversation.
Schedule a Membership Consultation at radence.com
The Radence Team
